Hands On Computer Simulation of Music Evolution

In this workshop, Dr Marcelo Gimenes will introduce the iMe (Interactive Musical Environments) computer system, a multi-agent platform designed to support experiments with musical creativity and evolution in artificial societies. The theoretical and technical challenges of each one of its components, from the perceptive, cognitive and generative to the decision-making and life-cycle models will be explained. Many of these are inspired on the biological evolutionary principles applied to music through the framework of Music Memetics. After a theoretical introduction, participants will be able to experiment with the system and observe how an initial pool of music samples could potentially give rise to new musical styles due to a history of successive interactions between the multiple agents in the environment.

To quickly get going, in the iMe application:

Create a new simulation (menu ‘File/New’)

Save the simulation in your hard disk (menu ‘File/Save’)

Add a few MIDI files to the Music Store (menu ‘Simulation/Show Music Store’)

Create a new CPMap with the Compositional and Performance Map tool (menu ‘Simulation/Show CPMap’). Alternatively, you can import a CPMap (there is one in the zip file provided)

Click on the ‘start’ button (or use the menu ‘Simulation/Start-Pause’)

Click here to download the files for the workshop. In the zip file, you will find a few MIDI files and a CPMap for you to start your experiments.